The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution. By Francis Fukuyama. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 608 pages; $35. To be published in Britain by Profile in May; £25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
《政治秩序起源：从史前时代到法国大革命》弗朗西斯·福山
WHY did the Catholic church’s insistence on priestly celibacy in the late 11th century give Europeans an early advantage over other societies in establishing the rule of law? The answer in Francis Fukuyama’s stimulating new book is that celibacy was one of several important reforms, instituted by Pope Gregory VII, which resulted in the development of canon law and the notion that even kings were subject to it. Gregory won everlasting fame by bending Henry IV, the Holy Roman Emperor, to his will, forcing the most powerful man in Europe to do penance before him at Canossa.
缘何天主教廷执意认为就建立法治而言，11世纪晚期僧侣的独身制度在起点上给欧洲文明相对于其他文明带来了早期裨益？答案就在弗朗西斯·福山这本激动人心的新书中。他认为教皇格里高利七世发动了一系列改进教会法规与观念的重要改革，自此即便国王也不得拂逆教会，而僧侣的独身制度正是这些改革之一。凭借迫使全欧洲最有权势的男人——神圣罗马帝国皇帝亨利四世听任摆布，在自己身处的卡诺莎城堡前摧眉折腰苦修求赎，格里高利赢得了百世不朽的莫大声望（译者注：君子报仇，十年不晚，其后亨利四世卧薪尝胆成功复仇，格里高利落寞客死乃是后话，堪称欧洲版的夫差与勾践）。
Celibacy was vital in the battle against corruption and rent-seeking within the church, both of which were the typical consequences of patrimony. The reforms gave the church the moral stature to evolve into what Mr Fukuyama describes as “a modern, hierarchical, bureaucratic and law-governed institution” that established its authority for spiritual affairs—and by so doing set the ground rules for the subsequent rise of the secular state.
鉴于教会敛财有方，内部腐败与寻租现象应运而生，而僧侣的独身制度对此能起到至关重要的抑制作用。教会的改革提供了自身适用的道德法规，福山先生称这些法规随后进化为一种构建教会对于精神事务的权威的“现代、等级、官僚与法治的制度”。也正因此，这些改革为随后世俗政权的崛起设定了一套基本准则。
Mr Fukuyama (a pupil of Samuel Huntington who wrote a seminal work on political order 40 years ago) begins his own search for the origins of political order with the shift from small hunting bands to tribes. This eventually brought about the “coming of the Leviathan” or the coercive state. It was a development driven partly by the increasing complexity of societies founded on agriculture but much more by the organisational challenges of conducting warfare on an ever-greater scale.
福山先生（其人为40年前写过政治秩序方面巨作的塞缪尔·亨廷顿的学生）从小规模狩猎团体到部落的转变开始着手研究，探寻政治秩序的起源。这种探寻最终会归结到“利维坦的出现”或者强制性政权。这种发展与跃迁部分归因于以农为本的文明渐增的复杂性，但更多的源于有组织的挑起规模不断增长的战争所带来的挑战。
With impressive erudition, the author travels across China, India, the Islamic world and different regions of Europe looking for the main components of good political order and at how and why these emerged (or failed to) in each place. The three critical ingredients, he argues, are a strong state, the application of the rule of law to all parts of society and a means of holding rulers to account for their actions.
身怀腹中五车书，作者足迹遍布中国、印度、伊斯兰世界及欧洲各地搜寻构成良好政治秩序的主要元素，并思索这些元素如何以及为何会出现（或消失）于各地。他主张其中三个关键元素为强大的政府，一视同仁的法治实施，以及对于统治者的问责制度。
The first unambiguously modern state, Mr Fukuyama believes, was the Qin dynasty in China, founded in 221BC. Many of the control mechanisms perfected by the Qin had developed during the preceding 500 years or so of the Eastern Zhou dynasty when a host of small warring states across China began to coalesce. Such elements included a merit-based (non-aristocratic) military leadership combined with mass conscription, sophisticated taxation systems and a bureaucracy recruited from a permanent administrative cadre selected on the basis of ability rather than family connection. The Qin simply went much further, assaulting every section of society in its remorseless attempt to establish a form of protototalitarian dictatorship.
福山认为首个明确的现代政权应为BC221年在中国建立的秦王朝。在其建立前约500年间，正是大量弱小的割据诸侯通过战争合并的东周列国时代，而秦王朝所完善的诸多统治手段正是在此期间发展而来。类似的构建政治秩序的元素还包括糅合大规模征兵制与基于军功（非贵族制）的擢黜制度的军事领导体系，精密复杂的税收体系以及以才干而非家世为基础挑选官员的固定行政官僚体系。在此基础上，秦王朝实实在在迈出了更大的步子。它毫不留情的打击社会的各个区域，试图建立一种原始极权独裁政权的范型。
The Qin’s extremism was also its undoing and it was soon replaced by the more enduring Han dynasty, which sought compromise with aristocratic elites and legitimation through a revived Confucianism. The Han state lasted for more than 400 years. But it was always vulnerable to what Mr Fukuyama calls “the bad emperor problem” as well as to the hardwired human tendency to make ties of kinship the primary criterion for conferring wealth, power and status. As Mr Fukuyama observes: “There is an inverse correlation between the strength of the centralised state and the strength of patrimonial groups. Tribalism…remains a default form of political organisation, even after a modern state has been created.”
秦王朝的这种极端主义也正是其崩溃之由，很快它便被更为持久的汉王朝取代。后者寻求达成与贵族精英的妥协，并通过儒学的复兴来确立自身的合法性。汉王朝因此持续了超过400年，但在某些环节上则总是显得脆弱不堪。福山将其归结为“昏君困境”，以及以血缘关系作为授予财富、权力、地位的首要标准的天性趋势。正如他观察到的：“中央集权政府与世袭宗法家族两股力量间存在着一种逆反相关性。即便现代政权已经建立，宗族制度依旧是政治组织的一种默认形式。”
Much of the book is concerned with the struggle between rulers in different parts of the world trying to forge powerful states (usually with the aim of military domination in times when conquest rather than technological progress was the main route to enrichment) while battling the astonishing ability of patrimonialism to undermine their efforts no matter what measures were used to break its grip. Chinese emperors favoured employing eunuchs in senior positions. Muslim rulers, from the Abbasids in the eighth century to the Mamluk sultanate in Egypt and the Ottomans, developed the institution of military slavery to lessen nepotism and the internal conflicts created by tribal loyalties.
书中大量篇幅涉及了世界各地的君主为了建立强大政权而所做的努力（通常当扩张的主要途径为征服而非技术进步时，这些努力的目标往往是建立其时的军事统治）。然而无论君主采取何种抵制措施以求摆脱家产制的桎梏，能量惊人的后者都会暗中侵蚀这种努力。中国的帝王倾向于招纳宦官担任高级职务。穆斯林君主，从八世纪的阿拔斯王朝哈里发到埃及的马穆鲁克王朝及土耳其帝国的苏丹，则设立了一种军事奴隶制度以求减少裙带关系与部族忠诚导致的内斗。
The Mamluks were meant to be a kind of one-generation nobility owing loyalty only to the sultan. Similarly, the Janissaries, the elite slave troops of the Ottoman emperors, were not allowed to marry. But in the end both systems decayed as first the Mamluks and then the Janissaries became interest groups powerful enough to subvert the centralised states they had been created to defend. Once again, patrimonialism reasserted itself.
马穆鲁克的初衷是一种仅忠于苏丹本人的非世袭贵族部队。类似地，作为土耳其苏丹的精锐奴隶部队的土耳其禁卫军不允许结婚。但随着马穆鲁克与土耳其禁卫军先后成为利益团体，最终这两种军事体系都腐化变质了。他们变得强大到足以颠覆其本应保卫的中央集权政府。于是家产制死灰复燃，卷土重来。
Mr Fukuyama makes an interesting comparison between 17th-century France, where royal absolutism was rather less absolute than it appeared and England, which, after the upheavals of the civil war and the 1688 revolution, became the first place (Denmark was probably next) to combine all three of the ingredients for a virtuous political order: a strong state, the rule of law and accountability. The problem in France was that the king did not feel strong enough to challenge the legal rights of the aristocracy, but both were happy to deny the rule of law to the peasantry and the rising commercial classes who bore the full brunt of meeting the king’s need for money to fight wars, through taxation. England at the time could in no sense be described as a democracy, but the idea of accountability was entrenched at all levels of society by centuries of the common law, creating the political conditions for a constitutional monarchy and a dynamic economy.
福山还对17世纪的法国与经历内战及1688年光荣革命剧变后的英国作了有趣的比较。前者的王权专制主义确实没有表面看上去的那样专制，而后者成为了首个结合全部有道德的政治秩序的组成元素中三种元素的国度（很有可能其次为丹麦），这三种元素为：强大的政府，法治以及问责制度。法国的问题在于国王并无信心挑战贵族的法定权力，但他们乐于携手共拒对于农民与新兴商业阶级实行法治。而后者则通过税收承担了填补国王因战争而产生的对于金钱的欲壑的主要任务。当时的英国从任何角度评价都无法称之为民主国家，但通过几个世纪的共同法的熏陶，社会的各个阶层都确立了问责观念。这为英国的君主立宪与充满活力的经济制度创造了政治条件。
Though this first volume concludes with the French revolution (a second, charting developments up to the present day, is in the works) its insights are relevant to our understanding of modern states and how they became what they are. For example, there is China with its incredibly smart centralised bureaucracy, weak rule of law and absence of accountability (Mao, argues Mr Fukuyama, shows that China has not yet escaped the “bad emperor” problem). Or there is India with its weak state, but much greater accountability and almost pedantic attachment to the law.
尽管第一卷以法国大革命结束（描绘此后发展直至今日的第二卷尚在写作中），该书的视角仍然着眼于我们对于现代政权的理解以及这种理解如何演化生成。比如说，书中提到中国有着精巧程度难以置信的中央集权官僚体制，同时有着孱弱的法治与问责制度的缺失（福山认为，毛泽东向世人展示了中国尚未摆脱“昏君”困境）。而另一方面，印度有着孱弱的政府，同时却有着远比政府强大的问责制度以及对于法律近于迂腐不知变通的遵循。
He also provides us with a yardstick for measuring the chances that the Arab awakening this spring will meet his three tests of political order (not high, at least not yet). Mr Fukuyama is still the big-picture man who gave us “The End of History”, but he has an unerring eye for illuminating detail. Books on political theory are not often page-turners; this one is.
他也给我们提供了衡量今春觉醒中的阿拉伯世界遭遇政治秩序三重考验的可能性的标尺（可能性不高，至少目前尚未）。福山依然是那位给我们描绘过“历史的终结”的统观大局者，但他同时也有着一双明察秋毫的如炬慧眼，从没看走眼过。政治学方面的书籍鲜有畅销者；然而这本书无疑会是一本畅销书。
